This leads to Garofalo’s theory of what America likes and why. "It’s all about familiarity," she says. "That’s why there’s chains and mall-ettes and Blockbuster and Burger ’N’ Brew. To get them reading you gotta have Barnes & Noble or Borders. It’s all connected: mediocre music, mediocre television, Twister, Mission: Impossible. They go to Independence Day and say, ‘Know what? Script doesn’t matter. I don’t care about dialogue. I’m going to the movie everyone is supposed to see.’

          "‘Welcome to the Dollhouse? I Shot Andy Warhol?’ It’s like K-Rock. It sounds odd to them. The rhythms are wrong. ‘ Ewwww.’ The sense of familiarity isn’t there. Let me point out that I’ve been a participant in some of the most brain-numbing movies out there. I’d love to name names, but people get angry. I just want to make it clear that it’s not lost to me that I’ve made movies that are not intellectually stimulating."

After years of watching others do comedy and jotting her own material down in notebooks, Garofalo started doing "open mike" stand-up in Boston in 1985. "I finally screwed up the courage," she says. She won a cable-TV contest as Funniest Person in Rhode Island — "a testament to the lack of talent among the other participants," she avers. Then she started working clubs. She would jam her hands in her pockets, stare at the ground, and utter wry observations. It drives her nuts that people don’t realize she’s been playing the same role — herself — for years. "As if it’s a contrivance," she complains.

          Supporting herself as a shoe salesman, a chat-line monitor (she lasted only a week because she wouldn’t talk dirty), a health-club receptionist, a bicycle messenger, and a movie-theater usher, she did stand-up for the next four years in Boston, Houston, and on the road before moving to Los Angeles in 1989. Dennis Miller’s brother Jimmy, best known as Jim Carrey’s manager, had given her his card one night in Boston, and soon booked her into all the top clubs. "Bombed everywhere, miserably — Comedy Store, the Ice House — but doing it the way I do it," she reports in her signature staccato syntax. "Jimmy was like, ‘Sorry…’ and he backed off." But one night at the Laugh Factory, Rick Messina saw her perform, signed on as her manager, and has stayed the course ever since.

          At 27, she became a regular on cutting-edge comedy television like The Dennis Miller Show and MTV’s Half-Hour Comedy Hour. Then she met Ben Stiller at Canter’s deli on Fairfax and "what started as a flirtation ended up a coworker situation" on his (late, lamented) Fox series, Then Ben Stiller Show. Stiller et al. Were both "resolute" and "last in the ratings," as she puts it, so she wasn’t surprised the show was canceled. "But that was my first encounter with what a frightening lack of vision most network executives have," she continues. "It didn’t scare me off, but I hated every second of it. It irritated me. An irritation that grows like a boil."

          Luckily, Garry Shandling was in the next makeup chair at the Stiller pilot taping and offered Janeane the role of Paula, the caustic talent booker on The Larry Sanders Show. HBO’s admiration balanced out Fox’s disdain.

          Working with Shandling and Stiller (who also directed her movie debut in Reality Bites) was a dream, "but unfortunately, it spoils you," she says. "They’re the best there is — my sense of humor." The situations she subsequently found herself in paled in comparison. "I got involved in stuff that was not in sync with me. I’ll do it anyway. I’ll commit to it. I’m not going to sell it out. But, man, you choke on it."

          She worked a lot in the early nineties, but "it was just work," she says. Then Garofalo moved to New York to join the twentieth-anniversary cast of NBC’s Saturday Night Live. "It was a fantasy from childhood," she says. "What could be better than live sketch comedy? It turned out disastrously. That was the year the bad karma came to a head. I missed the boat by one season. I didn’t have the self-esteem to make it through it, so I left. The comic time continuum was fucked up." She hates the subject of SNL — and not just because her abrupt departure caused bad blood. "I wish it was my job," she admits. "I wish I was going to work there tonight."

          Luckily, the Cyrano saga, Cats & Dogs, was gearing up just as SNL and Garofalo let each other down. It was perfect timing, and the role of Abby, the radio veterinarian whose neighbor was a model played by Uma Thurman, was a perfect showcase for her quirky talents. Afterward, she lost twenty-five pounds in a vain attempt to gain access to a wider selection of roles.

          "I had nothing on my plate," she says. "What do you do to increase your chance of employment? I know! Lose thirty pounds. I got the auditions, but I didn’t get the parts. I wasn’t being true to myself. What’s the common thread between the actresses on the cover of Vanity Fair? They look great in their underwear! It’s not a testament to talent, or Lili Taylor would have been there. If Matthew McConaughey didn’t look like that, we wouldn’t be hearing the spin doctors going mental."

          Garofalo promptly put the weight back on. But enough of that. "I’m bored of myself talking about it," she says.

But talk she will. And what she has to say is like a glass of cold water splashed in the face of Industry verities. Twisting and turning within the confines of her still-developing career, she’s determined to carve out a place for herself with a minimum of compromise. So, for instance, she’s turned down several fast-cash sitcoms and development deals. "They hand them out to comics like pills," she says. And she’s quick to criticize the results, though without naming names, because some of the stars are her friends. Still, she insists she doesn’t hate Hollywood. "That’s like saying the sky is blue," she says. "I actually enjoyed living there for seven years. I don’t like some of the inner workings, decisions that are made for all the wrong reasons. Focus-grouped mediocrity. But when people say people are plastic in Hollywood, I want to punch them in the face."

          Her saving grace is that she’s even tougher on herself than she is on her business. She revels in relating how she goes unrecognized in public, insisting she’s no star despite ample evidence to the contrary, claiming that she dreams of being a talk-radio host. And despite the existence of several Garofalo "worship" sites on the World Wide Web, neither does she feel she’s a cult figure.

          "‘Cult figure’ implies I’m cool, and I think I’ve lost my cool cachet," she says. "You can ride a long way on the Sanders-Stiller connection, but I don’t foresee this ever being huge. I am just famous enough to be annoyed by it. Last night we worked till dawn in Jersey City — it’s a real thrill to work in Jersey City — and as I was leaving, these two kids who’ve been waiting around the trailers go, ‘Hey, hey, hey, girl. Get us Sly’s autograph.’ Or the woman who does my bikini waxing will vaguely recognize me. That’s what I’ve got." Strange as it sounds, straddling stardom’s fence may be the only — if not the most comfortable — place for Garofalo to be.

BUZZ